All those Desi and Lucy posts have reminded me of Nelson and Jerry.
Nelson Blanco was born in Cuba in 1947 and fled to the United States in the Mariel Boatlift in 1980.
Jerry DiFalco was born in Camden, NJ, in 1952, and tried to make a living as a painter in Philadelphia.
Sometime in the early 1980s Nelson was in a bar when Jerry overheard him speaking to a companion about Jean-Paul Sartre, not the usual subject of bar talk. So Jerry decided he had to meet this person.
It didn’t take long before they were living together. Think of the struggling artists in La Boheme and you might have the picture. Or maybe not.
I met them around 1990, I think, about the time when their relationship was coming to an end, Jerry having met someone else, but they were still living together. I happened to be friends with the someone else, whose name was Ron Funk, which is how I got dragged into their soap opera.
Before Jerry had moved out of the apartment that he and Nelson shared, Nelson was diagnosed with HIV.
So although Jerry’s new relationship was in full swing, so to speak, he felt he owed it to Nelson to remain with him. There followed several years of awkwardness with Nelson usually referring to Jerry’s new squeeze, that is, my friend Ron, as “the other woman”.
Nelson tended to be very judgmental and rather waspish; I suspect he was very intelligent and simply would not suffer fools gladly. The problem was that he assumed everyone was a fool until proven otherwise. Jerry, on the other hand, was a cornucopia of neuroses; he was seemingly always suffering from some ailment or another, and it was difficult to tell if the ailments were real or whether he was a hypochondriac. Plus, he had an alcohol problem. I don’t think he was an full blown alcoholic, but he definitely drank too much, and alcohol exacerbated the worst side of his personalty. When he was sober, he was annoying but tolerable; when he was drinking, which was most of the time when I was around him, he was a mess.
Jerry’s painting seemed to be stuck in a rut during this time. I think of it as his Brick Period because everything he painted was filled with bricks of one sort or another.
I would see them periodically whenever Ron had a party or sometimes I’d be invited over for dinner with the three of them. That was the time, if I recall correctly, when new and experimental drugs were seemingly appearing weekly and disappearing without a trace. Nelson’s condition would wax and wane. One time after I hadn’t seen him for a few months, Nelson surprised me at a local drug store and I didn’t recognize him at first. Whatever medication he was on had blown him up like a balloon. Happily, as soon as he stopped taking it, he returned almost to his normal size.
Somewhere along the line Nelson’s mother received permission to visit him for a week; that was the first and only time they saw each other since his emigration to the US in 1980.
Something strange happened to Nelson’s personality. To tell the truth, I didn’t particularly like him when I first met him. But after his diagnosis, he seemed to calm down, and he became much less judgmental, and towards the end he almost seemed to undergo a personality change. He actually became likable.
As I said, Nelson was from Cuba and Jerry was an American, and they sometimes jokingly referred to each other as Ricky and Lucy.
During one of Nelson’s final hospital stays, I stopped in to see him, and he was in a particularly chipper mood that day. While I was there, an orderly came into the room, and he heard Nelson referring to Jerry as Lucy.
The orderly turned to me and asked, “So who are you? Ethel?”
“No,” I shot back. “I’m Little Ricky. Wanna spank me?”
It was only a few weeks later that Nelson died on August 17, 1993, at the age of 46. The obituary referred to Jerry as his longtime companion and Ron as Nelson’s beloved friend. Well, it was Jerry and Ron who wrote the obit, I guess.
Jerry held a memorial service for Nelson on September 11 at the Nexus Gallery, whose director was Anne Raman, a friend of Jerry’s who regularly featured his work and attended Ron’s parties. It was during the eulogy that I heard Jerry describe how he met Nelson.
As part of the service Jerry played what he claimed was Nelson’s favorite song: “What I Did For Love”
And Jerry finally stopped painting pictures with bricks.
Full Disclosure: When putting together a biographical movie, writers often rearrange a few details or invent scenes in order to make a more dramatic story. And so I must admit that the Little Ricky comment is something that occurred to me on the way out of the hospital, not something that I actually said. But this way makes a better story, no?